Provisioning platforms exist which permit a systems administrator or other user to instantiate, configure, and provision software installations on physical and virtual machines. Available provisioning platforms can, for instance, allow an administrator to create a profile or template for the operating system, application set, security, and other resources of a group of target machines. The provisioning platform can then, for example, invoke local installation daemons or other logic to distribute the selected operating system code and other code and resources down to the target machine in a “bare metal” or initial physical installation, an update delivery, and/or to a virtual machine hosted in a cloud or other network.
In the case of storage configurations, existing provisioning platforms can register the physical storage attached to one or more target machines, and reflect the available hard disk, optical disk, and/or other resources with the provisioning server or other logic, to record the configurations of the deployed machines. In existing provisioning platforms, however, there is no mechanism to integrate storage from an independent storage area network (or SAN) into the configuration profile of a set of new or updated machines. Existing provisioning platforms likewise lack the ability to select, specify, or configure specific storage sources from a SAN that can be accessed or used to fulfill the storage specifications of a newly provisioned or updated machine being serviced by the provisioning server. It may be desirable to provide methods and systems for integrating storage resources from a storage area network in a provisioning platform, wherein interfaces to the storage resources of a SAN can be built into the configuration process for newly provisioned or updated machines, and in which discrete, pooled, or other storage devices can be transparently specified to satisfy storage allocation requirements.